Day Two Cloud 190: Serious Public Clouds Invest In Infrastructure With Charles Fitzgerald

On today’s Day Two Cloud we dive into how the public clouds spend their money and what IT and engineering folks can learn from those spending patterns. We also look at the notion of cloud repatriation and how prevalent (or not) it is. Our guest is Charles Fitzgerald, a CapEx obsessive who writes the Platformonomics blog. He’s also a consultant, strategist, and angel investor. We discuss: * Why a public cloud’s CapEx matters * How CapEx might indicate a particular strategy or direction * Drawing conclusions from capital spending by the Big 3 * Can smaller public clouds compete? * Why we’re seeing repatriation discussions * What CapEx spending from hosting providers might tell us about repatriation * More Show Links: @charlesfitz – Charles Fitzgerald on Twitter Should I Stay Or Should I Go? – Platformonomics Platformonomics Repatriation Index™ – Q4 2022: The Search Continues – Platformonomics Follow the CAPEX: Cloud Table Stakes 2021 Retrospective – Platformonomics IBM’s “Cloud” Business (or Lack Thereof) – Platformonomics Transcript: [00:00:00.650] – Ned Welcome to day two. Cloud. Today we are talking to Cap X obsessive Charles Fitzgerald of the platform Anomics blog. And woo, I said it right the first time. He is a fascinating character who’s been around the industry for a while, and he takes a somewhat unique perspective on how to judge what the public clouds are doing. Right, Ethan? [00:00:22.930] – Ethan Well, yes, that is how much are they spending on their infrastructure. And he’s got all kinds of measurements and metrics that demonstrate exactly how much of an investment AWS and Azure and GCP and a lot of other folks are making in their clouds a metric by which we engineers can judge how serious should we take these people? [00:00:44.030] – Ned Right? That has been a growing concern. Is cloud repatriation happening? Do I have to worry about these alternative clouds? And I think Charles helps us get some perspective on what’s going on. So enjoy this show with Charles Fitzgerald. All right, Charles. Welcome to day two. Cloud. Let’s get started with some introductions. Who are you and what would you say you do around here? [00:01:07.590] – Charles Well, I’m Charles Fitzgerald. I’m a Seattle based angel investor focusing mostly on developer platforms, infrastructure, other kinds of plumbing. Spent over 20 years working on platform businesses at Microsoft and VMware. I basically do color commentary on Twitter, elon allowing, and I’m a bit of a capex obsessive. So that’s why we’re here today. [00:01:30.460] – Ned That is certainly how go ahead, Ethan. [00:01:33.450] – Ethan When you say angel investor, Charles, as in very early seeds, someone’s trying to get started, you as an angel investor might come up with a check out of your bank account and help those folks get started on whatever their vision is. [00:01:47.060] – Charles Yes. So working with super early stage companies, maybe just one, two,